Söderström, Von Stade, Battle in a great operatic moment

One day recently George and I were trying to figure out who the stars were in a performance of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier that we saw when the Metropolitan Opera was on tour in Cleveland in the early ’80s.  I remembered for sure that the Marschallin was Elisabeth Söderström, and I thought that Octavian was probably Frederica Von Stade, but I didn’t remember who sang Sophie.

He then uncovered an amazing reference site at the Met’s web site: a database of every performance and performer under the Met’s auspices, including tour performers.  In that site he was able to determine that the performers were (as I thought) Söderström, Von Stade, and Kathleen Battle as Sophie.  They were the Rosenkavalier trio of the day.

Then in best Web 2.0 fashion, he found on Youtube a video of the great final trio from the opera from a Met gala of the time (the 100th anniversary celebration of the Met).  The best five minutes in all of opera (despite Von Stade’s really unfortunate dress):

Met Opera HD broadcast of “Madama Butterfly”: a guest report

I didn’t make it to last week’s Metropolitan Opera HD video broadcast of Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly”, but here is a report from the Virtual Farm Boy Special Correspondent in Washington, DC, who attended the rebroadcast of the performance on March 18th.

Made it to Friendship Hts., movie theater was almost full of people about 70. The production must be really gorgeous in person, but one really only gets a hint in the HD, partly because of their  obsession with having it look like TV – about one shot in six lets you see anything except the fine details of the upper torsos of the cast – and partly because it’s VERY stagey and at the same time the effects are rather understated and would depend on the immediacy of sitting right under them. There were lots of light-and-shadow effects that were supposed to be accentuated by a huge mirror flown upstage. But even on the infrequent occasion when there was a shot wide enough to include it, it didn’t really read for the cameras. It’s a theatre effect.

On the bright side, there was also a fair amount of not-very-convincing Japanese style dancing (crowds mostly) that got passed over. Unfortunately, it was in favor of close shots of the diva’s white facepowder and scary hair.

This one was the worst so far for being just too damned close to the singers, and it made it really strain any willing suspension of disbelief. Let’s face it, Patricia Racette is a wonderful singer, but photographed from 10″ away and with about 8 lbs of white powder on her face, it’s about as hard to imagine her being really desireable as it is to picture Marcello Giordani as a hot young stud.  And watching people sing  that close up isn’t attractive.  There’s a realy silly moment (directorial faux pas really) when she runs downstage (which is really DOWN, the stage is steeply raked)  into his arms and he lifts her up over his head. With Natalie Dessay and Juan Diego Florez this might be visually OK, even charming. Patricia Racette is a bigish girl, and she’s wearing the mother of all enormous kimonos. She looks like a side-by-side refrigerator in slippers coming toward him.  So when we’re supposed to be thinking, “Ahh, young love,” what’s going through my mind is, “Geeze, the rehearsals for THAT must have been painful.” As he’s putting her down she sings, “Oh, you’re so strong!”  I couldn’t help a guffaw. Together they had all the sex appeal of the average AARP ad, I thought. Seeing them in what’s about the most explicitly sexy scene until people started actually doing it on stage a few years later, all I could think of was that description of Nelson Eddy and Jeannette McDonald: “the Iron Butterfly and the Singing Capon.” And that was just made worse by being so close to them.  Oddly, she looked a lot prettier, and a lot more Japanese, in the terrible lighting backstage, chewing the fat with Renata Flambé. Giordani looked like what he seems to be, a stick puppet with a big voice.

Speaking of puppets, they were  cool, although again the TV production made it  annoying. There are three puppeteers for each of them, dressed in black, and with their faces veiled in black. Loud and clear message:”They should disappear.” But the camera was SO close that we got treated to the full drama of their hammy facial expressions right through the veils. Part of the motivation of using the puppet was supposed to have been for the singers not to have to “cope” with the mute child performer, for which read, “Children always upstage adults.” In this case the puppeteeers were a huge distraction, I thought, simply because there wasn’t the dramatic distance that the production was conceived to have, waaaay more distracting than a cute 4 year-old. And on stage, I’m sure it was fine.

I guess this all bugs me because I used to be a threatre person, so I already know what it looks like up close, there’s isn’t any fascination about it, and I want to see the pretty picture, not feel like “an insider.”  I read the reviews about these things and people just wax rhapsodic about how cool all the behind-the-scene stuff is. It all just sets my teeth on edge.  La Fleming was yakking away with Anthony Minghella’s widow before I could even get my nose blown at the end of the Humming Chorus. It was a fine interview (much better than sweating singers talking about singing <yawn>) but all that sportscast pacing  is just weird.

And LOUD? I want to tell you. Almost painfully so at moments. But that’s the theater’s fault, not the Met. I think the one in Valley View when we saw Boheme had the best sound of any of these I’ve been to.

Dwayne Croft was fabulous as Sharpless (although there again, he’s an opera singer who acts a little and that’s a bit stiff and ungainly up close) and Maria Zifchak as Suzuki was the best thing on the stage, except for the dancer PInkerton in the little ballet  at the entr’acte of Act 3, who was H-O-T.

Ms. Flambé (can’t they get her to soften her voice a little and not over enunciate every single consonant?  She sounds like Eleanor the Eloqutionist!) did a rundown of the HD brodcasts for next year: nine, including Aida, Hoffmann, Turandot, AND Rosenkavalier. And Carrrrrrrrrmen.   Lulu passed over again. Sorry.

“La Damnation de Faust”: The Met meets Cirque du Soleil

Yesterday I attended the Metropolitan Opera HD video broadcast of Berlioz’s “La Damnation de Faust” in a new production by Robert Lepage, starring Marcello Giordani (Faust), Susan Graham (Marguerite) and John Relyea (Mephistopheles).  Met Music Director James Levine conducted.  Musically it was a triumph; visually it was trendy, with all the visual bells and whistles, with some striking effects, but lacking real dramatic impact.

The work itself is dramatically problematic, without continuity, slipping back and forth in time, leaving out significant events.  It is most often performed as a kind of “dramatic oratorio.”  The visuals are left to the imagination.

In this production Robert Lepage (among his other works is the staging of Cirque du Soleil’s show “Ka” in Las Vegas) has turned the Met’s huge stage into a multi-level structure with a series of rather narrow vertical playing areas. The playing area accepts front and rear video projections, which are controlled in part by infrared sensors that sense movement and body heat on the stage areas.  For examples, when dancers are performing in front of projections of drapes, their movement creates the appearance of movement in the drapes.  At various times performers walk perpendicularly up the scaffolded playing area, then “fall down” again.  The images are arresting, but not necessarily related to the music.  The costumes were beautiful, despite Mephistopheles being got up in a costume with a headpiece that looked like a brown cockroach, and the the unfortunate decision to have the male chorus perform shirtless in the final scene.  Too many video closeups.

The three prinicpals were excellent.  Marcello Giordani has more of an Italianate sound than French, but he handled the music very well.  John Relyea was sinuous as the devil.  Susan Graham was magnificent in the relatively short role of Marguerite.  (She doesn’t appear until the second act, which enabled Ms. Graham to act as host for the opening fo the video broadcast.  Thomas Hampson did the honors for the intermission.) The brilliant Met chorus made major contributions throughout, as did the world-class Met orchestra.  Levine obviously has a strong personal affinity for the piece and it showed through in this performance.

Met HD Video Broadcast: Karita Mattila as Salomé

Karita Mattila a Salomé

Today was the Met’s first Saturday afternoon video broadcast for the season.  I saw it at the Cinemark Theaters in Valley View, south of downtown Cleveland.  I started going to that theater last season, because the one closest to me was always packed and unpleasant.  Others have discovered it as well, because there was a much larger group, but all gray-hairs.  I was amongst the youngest in the audience.

The opera was Richard Strauss’s Salomé, with Karita Mattila in the title role; Ildikó Komlósi as Herodias; Juha Uusitalo as John the Baptist; Kim Begley as Herod; and Joseph Kaiser as Narroboth. Patrick Summers conducted. The production was by Jügen Flimm, with sets and costumes by Santo Loquasto.  The period was updated from biblical times to (perhaps) World War I, with Herod and his guests in evening dress.  Herodias was in a  glamorous black and green off-the-shoulder gown and was made up as if she was Elizabeth Taylor in the “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” era.  Fellow Salomé Deborah Voigt was the host, introducing Mattila before the performance (who words to the audience were that she was going out “to kick ass.”)  And she did—it was a stunning performance.   The camera was able to focus on the degredation.  The only snort of laughter was when Salomé describes Jokanaan as “gaunt”.  Mr. Uusitalo looked as if he’d never missed a good meal.  He did not have the vocal force and magnificence of some great Jokanaans of the past (for example, Bryn Terfel most recently), but he was decent.

It was Karita Mattila’s show, however. She threw herself into the part, sliding around on the stage using her body as much as her voice.  She was first in a slinky white negligee/formal dress, and in the final scene with the head of John the Baptist she was in a black bathrobe.  Her voice was variously sensuous, powerful, strident, but she acted the part.  It was an incredible achievement.  It had been previously announced that the movie theater audience would not see Mattila “take it all off” at the end of the “Dance of the Seven Veils.”  We saw her topless with her arms covering her breasts, but at the climax of the dance, we saw instead a close-up of Herod’s face in ecstasy.

The final scene, in which Salomé makes out with the severed head of John the Baptist, was riveting, alternating adoring and abhorring her victim and object of her lust.  Her sexual energy built until the point at which she kisses his mouth.  She is left audibly panting in post-sexual-climax exhaustion, with mouth and lips covered with blood.  At the end of the opera, Herod orders Salomé to be killed.  The scene is usually staged with soldiers crushing the Princess;  in this case, the same black slave executioner pulls his sword and Salomé rips open her gown before the blackout.

As one should at a performance of this opera, I felt exhausted and filthy at the end. It is easy to see why the opera caused a scandal at its premiere in 1905 and why it was banned in some cities.  Over a hundred years later it is still shocking.

In memoriam Beverly Sills

I believe that I only heard Beverly Sills sing live once, at the Metropolitan Opera about 1979 (or perhaps early 1980) in a new, beautiful production of Donizetti’s comic opera Don Pasquale. By that point in her career, her voice had faded, but she held the stage like no other. I still remember her first “entrance”, as she came into view rolling around on a stage turntable revealing her sitting on a wicker divan smoking a cigarette in a very long cigarette holder. There was an audible gasp of delight from the audience before the diva had even sung a note.

Beverly Sills was, as has been noted by the many tributes today, the embodiment of opera for American audiences. The New York Times obituary is typical. There is, of course, a whole generation of listeners too young to have heard her sing; they were born after she retired from singing in 1980. But they remember her as the plump lady with the bright red hair who appeared on countless TV cultural TV shows as the host. Even this past Spring she was still doing backstage interviews during the Met’s HD video broadcasts. There is no other opera singer of our era who comes close to the public popularity of Beverly Sills, other than perhaps Luciano Pavarotti. (Renee Fleming is giving it the old college try, but a lot of venues open to Sills–for example, the late night talk shows–are no longer options for the new generation.

Much has been made of Beverly Sills’s devotion to the New York City Opera, as her “home” company. After she retired from singing, she became the General Director of NYCO, before she moved on to be Chairwoman of Lincoln Center, and finally, Chairwoman of the Metropolitan Opera. All through her life she had a series of personal tragedies, including two seriously disabled children, who would have made another woman give up. She has stated that her work is what kept her going.

Of all of her roles, the one that will be in my mind as the ultimate “Beverly Sills role” was that of Baby Doe in Douglas Moore’s The Ballad of Baby Doe, so I was delighted to find this video clip of her singing the beautiful “Willow Song” in the prime of her career. The quality of the video itself is not that great, but you can get a glimpse of Beverly Sills’s artistry. That artistry and Beverly Sills’s indefatigable spirit were a blessing on the world.

Cultural weekend number 2: Beethoven and Tan Dun

For the second weekend in a row I had two fulfilling cultural experiences. Friday night, January 12th, I took my friend Robert to hear the Cleveland Orchestra perform Beethoven’s 9th symphony. Now, performances of Beethoven’s 9th are not all that rare; but the orchestra pulled out all the stops for a top-drawer performance, which was recorded live for eventual CD release. (Why don’t they put it on the iTunes store and be done with it, like New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Philadelphia Orchestra?) It is my understanding that they don’t yet have a record label signed to release it.

The soloists were outstanding, especially the German bass René Pape, who is arguable the best bass in the world. (Two weeks ago he sang Sarastro at the Met in The Magic Flute.) The soprano was the up-and-coming Canadian Measha Brueggergosman, the tenor was also a Met veteran, Frank Lopardo, and the mezzo was American Kelly O’Connor (who, along with Dawn Upshaw is one of Osvaldo Golijov’s muses). Franz Welser-Möst conducted. In this blog I often complain about the excess of standing ovations at Severance Hall, but in this case it was deserved. The whole thing was thrilling. The first half of the concert was devoted to the orchestra’s first performance of Leonard Bernstein’s “Jeremiah” Symphony from 1944. Bernstein’s Jewish heritage was reflected, as was a generally dark spirit of wartime America. Mezzo Kelly O’Connor sang the vocal solo that is the last movement, with text from the biblical Lamentations of Jeremiah. The orchestra takes the program to Miami next week for their Florida residency.

On Saturday afternoon I went to another of the Metropolitan Opera HD video broadcasts up at the Regal Cinemas at Severance Center in Cleveland Heights. This week’s opera could not have been more different from last week’s Bellini. This was the world premiere broadcast of the Chinese composer Tan Dun’s The First Emperor, commissioned by the Met a decade ago and first performed the end of December 2006. It has not gotten very good reviews in the press, so I was both anticipatory and skeptical. But seeing and hearing the performance, I was blown away by the colossal achievement that Tan has made in combining the Western operatic tradition with the Chinese musical tradition. The First Emperor is a work of power and beauty. It is true that the opera could stand some trimming (the pace of parts of it seemed glacial) and the concept of Placido Domingo, the great Spanish tenor, playing Chinese and singing in heavily Spanish-accented English was bizarre, but the orchestral and vocal colors, including a star of the Peking Opera, and American operatic stars Michelle DeYoung, Paul Groves, and Elizabeth Futral, were unparalleled in American operatic history. Tan’s orchestral writing was the most imaginative. Some of the vocal writing moved into generic long-lined romantically-inspired lyricism. But the thing was well considered, and very clearly a hit with the audience. The production and costumes were gorgeous. The Met spared no expense for this production, and it showed. I was able to capture at home from the Met’s internet stream the audio portion of the broadcast, and I have subsequently listened to the whole thing again today, and my opinion only rises about its worth. (For you copyright hawks out there: no, I recorded it for my own personal use, and, no, I am not going to put it out for others to have.)

The director of the video (top-notch characteristics were described after last week’s performance) was Brian Large, who has made a long career of directing opera for televised performance. It captured the essence of this complex new work. I believe that PBS will eventually broadcast The First Emperor. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Hooray to the Met for commissioning it and giving a worthy production.

My cultural weekend

Two amazing musical events this past weekend:

On Saturday afternoon I went to the Metropolitan Opera’s high-definition video broadcast of Bellini’s I Puritani at the Regal Cinemas at Severance Center in Cleveland Heights. The brilliant Russian soprano Anna Netrebko sang the role of Elvira, and the young American tenor Eric Cutler was Arturo. (Don’t even ask about the plot—essentially there is none, and whatever story line exists solely for the purpose of beautiful music and virtuosic singing.)

Technically, the broadcast was astonishing. The video was extremely clear and the sound caught the ambiance of the Metropolitan Opera house itself. In many ways it was better than being in the house, because it was possible to see the singers up close and the sound was clear and balanced. (For the $18.00 I paid for the ticket on Saturday, at the Met I would have been up in the Family Circle, a half mile away, like watching a puppet show.) There were aspects of the usual Saturday afternoon radio broadcast, with the radio host Margaret Juntwait announcing and retired soprano Beverly Sills offering “color commentary” about the opera. (I later confirmed that the radio broadcast carried the same commentary, and there was none of the usual synopsis of the opera plot, which must have made a lot of listeners quite confused.)

The theater at Severance was about three-quarters full, mostly gray hairs (did they bus them in from Judson Manor?) I felt like I was the youngest one there. But who cares who was there; it seems like a successful crowd, and I hope that the Met continues the series next season. I’ll be attending the next video broadcast at Severance next Saturday of Tan Dun’s new opera, The First Emperor, starring Placido Domingo.

Yesterday afternoon the Cleveland Museum of Art sponsored a recital by the Swiss organist Guy Bovet at St. John’s Cathedral downtown. It’s part of the museum’s Viva and Gala Around Town, presenting concerts and and other events in venues all over Cleveland while the museum’s Gartner Auditorium is out of commission for renovation. Bovet played brilliantly, and he chose exactly the kind of brainy and eclectic program that I love: not a note of Bach or Reger to be heard. Instead, he played a transcription of Liszt’s tone poem “Orpheus,” and his own transcription of Ravel’s “Mother Goose” suite. He also played two of his own original compositions, and two major works by the French composer Jehan Alain, “Le jardin suspendu” and “Trois Danses.” The dances are not played often: difficult, extraordinarily complex rhythmically. Bovet’s performance was persuasive. All through the recital he used the cathedral’s 1948 Holtkamp organ with great imagination (I’ve played it, and it’s an eccentric instrument. It has some beautiful sounds, but it’s a bit unusual in its specification.) The cathedral was almost full: bravo to all concerned.

Joseph Volpe at the Met

“The Toughest Show on Earth: My Rise and Reign at the Metropolitan Opera” (Joseph Volpe)

I’ve just finished reading Joseph Volpe’s new memoir, The Toughest Show on Earth: My Rise and Reign at the Metropolitan Opera. Volpe was for sixteen years the General Manager at the Met, where he (in)famously reigned with an iron fist. This book is his version of the various controversies that surrounded his tenure. It is also a history of his rise through the ranks, from apprentice carpenter, to Master Carpenter, to Assistant Director to General Manager. He is the only General Manager of the Met to have risen through the ranks, which is the fundamental cause of some of his demonstrable insecurity. In the eyes of the Met Board, he was never “one of us,” since he had no social standing, a badge of honor in Volpe’s own eyes. He brings that fact up over and over–and assuredly his board never let him forget in the most condescending ways.

There are chapters devoted to his firing of Kathleen Battle; to his objections to the redevelopment of Lincoln Center, and others. He writes pretty unflatteringly about a number of singers, among them Luciano Pavarotti, although it is clear that he is fond of Pavarotti. Volpe even gets a dig in at the great Plácido Domingo, who has “forgotten more roles than most people know,” the consequence of which is that Domingo is riveted to the prompter’s box just to get through the opera. The singers upon which he spends most of his time are of the current generation: Renee Fleming, René Pape, Cecilia Bartoli, among others.

The book, although entertaining, is lightweight reading, and seems like a rush-job. (It was published just in time for the gala performance celebrating Volpe’s retirement from the Met.) There’s not a lot of reflection, and not a lot of revelation. It is a surface assemblage of facts, names and dates, as if Volpe went through his engagement calendar and diary and picked out some samples to write about. The analysis of his tenure at the Met will be written by others.